home is everywhere and nowhere
I went overseas to visit my extended family. I cried at the airport saying goodbye. I presented my tear-stained face at security while they searched my bag for a ‘spray’ that ended up just being my asthma inhaler. By the time I got to the gate, they were already making the final boarding call.
On the flight back, I barely slept. When I did, it was for brief intervals and I did not register either falling asleep or waking up, so my only indication that i had slept was that the time had jumped forward by twenty or thirty minutes.
The plane landed at 6am and by the time the taxi dropped me home it was almost 8. I immediately went to lie in my mother’s bed, with the electric blanket draped over me. In the next room, my mother cooked me eggs and chorizo. When they were ready, she called me and I ate while talking to her at the dining table. I’m going to go sleep now, I said, once I had finished eating. As I drifted off to sleep I could feel all the things that had angered me over the past few months dissipate. It felt like the calm, quiet relief of taking valium, except more lucid. I had nothing to be angry about, ever, with anything. It felt like I was having multiple epiphanies.
A few days later I took a plane back to college. I’m never not thinking about plane crashes when I fly but it’s always worse on domestic flights. I don’t know why. I landed at 10pm and it was bucketing down with rain. My friend picked me up and when I gave him my card to pay for parking I had to cross my fingers and pray that it wouldn’t decline. I paid an extra eighty dollars for my luggage in the anticipation that it would be overweight but it wasn’t. I struggled to lift my suitcase into the boot of the car. The whole situation felt like a giant humiliation ritual.
I keep telling myself that I have time to do things later, but I don’t, and experiences just keep passing by. I feel like I’m not making the most out of my college experience, I tell one of my friends. I think so too, she says, I think you should try to do more.